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is consistently pleasing, with appealing character designs and lovingly detailed close-ups of the food.
The meat of the anime, so to speak, is the cooking, which I suppose is to be expected. A typical episode follows one or both of the leads as they are placed in a scenario in which they must either outperform an opponent established to have exceptional skills in a particular field of cooking or meet the standards of a seemingly unpleasable judge, usually illustrated by a succession of nameless extras presenting their own unsatisfactory meals. Whenever a named character's dish is being eaten, the eater will, without fail, squeal and convulse in nigh-orgasmic delight, then describe the taste and cooking technique with purple prose so thick as to make Lovecraft blush, accompanied by some kind of illustrated simile. This style of presentation may appeal to the technically minded, but grows tiresome and repetitive over the course of the season's 24 episodes. It's hard to be impressed with the main characters' skills when just about every dish is treated like Manna from Heaven and one can expect to hear terms like "umami" and "depth of flavour" thrown around ad nauseum. For this reason, Food Wars works best when the leads are forced to come up with creative solutions, focusing shifting the focus away from sensory spectacle and more on to problem solving.
As a story, Food Wars walks a well-trodden path, focusing first and foremost on Soma's ambition to reach the highest echelons of Tōtsuki Academy and surpass his father in terms of culinary skill. Despite the school setting, characters are rarely shown learning or training, instead preferring to throw its leads from one sink-or-swim challenge to another, trusting the audience to assume that they already have the necessary skills with maybe a flashback or post hoc explanation as to how the characters developed them. This isn't an invalid method of storytelling per se, but it's easy to see how some people could be turned off from the show because of it. Characters that play antagonistic roles will generally show some combination of smugness, elitism and outright corruption, to the point where one starts to wonder if Tōtsuki is even that good of a school.